F 74 
.05 His 
Copy 1 



A SERMON 

PREACIIKD IN THE 

MEETING-HOUSE OF THE EIRST CHURCH, 
DORCHESTER, 

oiv sxj]vi>A.Y, jxjivi: lo, isyo. 



BEING TIIK TWO HUNDRED AND FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 

FIRST ASSEMBLING OF THE CHURCH FOR DIVINE SERVICE 

AFTER ITS LANDING IN AMERICA. 



By NATHANIEL HALL, 

PASTOR OF THB CHCRCH. 



BOSTON : 

EBENEZER CLAPP, NO. 7 SCHOOL STREET. 
Printed by David Clapp & Son. 

1870. 



A SERMON 

rilEACUKl) IN THE 

MEETING-nOUSE OP THE EIRST CIIUECH, 
DORCHESTER, 



BEING THE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 

FIRST ASSEJIBLING OF THE CHURCH FOR DIVINE SERVICE 

AFTER ITS LANDING IN AMERICA. 



By NATHANIEL HALL. 

PASTOR OF THE CHURCII. 



BOSTON: 

EB-ENEZER CLAPP, NO. 7 SCHOOL STREET. 

Printed hy David Clapp & Son. 

1810. 



^■' 



IN ttXCHANGB 



BOSTOI*, June 20, 1870. 
Rev. Nathaniel Hall. 

Dear Sir: — 

Having listened vfith great pleasure to your very interesting discourse of 
yesterday morning, upon the history of the First Churcli and Parish of Dorchester, 
msvy we ask of you tlie favor of a copy for pul>lication ? 

Daniel Denny, 
and many other Parisliionere^ 



DoRCiiESTKn, .Tunc, 1870^ 
My Dkak Fkiends :— 

In sending you my Sermon, as you request, for public.ition— which in 
respect to your judgment I am happy to do— it may be proper for me to say, that I 
have retained some passages, which, to avoid a wearisome length, were omitted in 
the preaching; and also that, for the sake of a greater completeness, some things 
are added to the original manuscript. 

Tours, with mucli regard, 

Nathaniel Hall. 
To Daniel Denny and others. 



/ 



SERMON. 



I 



1 Kings, viii. 57: 

■*'G0D BE WITH us AS HE WAS "WITH OUR FATHERS." 

TAKE these words for a text this morning, not 
alone for their sentiment, but also as being borne 
upon the seal of the municipality of which our late 
town is now a part : " Slcut Patrihus Sit Deus 
Nobis." We reach, to-day, the two hundred and 
fortieth anniversary of the first assembling for divine 
service on these American shores of the founders 
of our church. As being the first anniversary of 
it occurring under this seal and the civic authority 
it represents, it seems fitting and well to make it an 
occasion for presenting some of the leading facts 
in the church's history. Familiar enough to most 
of you, those who are rising to take our places may 
be profited by their rehearsal. Nor can any of us, 
I think, fail of being so ; if it shall do no more 
than make dearer to us this church of our inheritance 
and our transmission, and truer our fidelity to it. 
For, it is no mean inheritance that has thus descended 



to us ; it is no ordinary history whose records we 
unroll ; it is no ignoble root that bears us. 

Looking back through two hundred and two score 
years, w^e see, met together in the outer air, 
evidently for some common and absorbing purpose, 
a company of one hundred and forty persons, 
' men and women, and here and there children 
among them — gleams of human sunshine, relieving 
the solemn staidness that elsewhere rules. The 
spot is near this we are now occupying, though it 
cannot be precisely designated. It is a Sabbath 
morning, answering in date to this ; and they are 
gathered for worship. It is the beginning of the 
second week since their landing from the old-world 
shores. All is yet strange to them — save, may be, 
the sky ; and that, in its blue and cloudless splendor, 
seems another than they have known. Gloriously 
it sweeps above them, its golden light sifting down 
through the young Summer's swaying foliage upon 
their reverently bared and bending heads. And hark ! 
how grandly through those forest arches echoes the 
unwonted melody, following prayer and exhortation, 
of their uplifted psalm. Religious services are their 
delight. In no feeling of superstition, no mere con- 
straint of obligation, do they resort to them, but be- 
cause their hearts crave them, as refreshment aud 
food. They did not w^ait till God should bring them 
to the stable land ; but all across the Atlantic's 



breadth, amidst tossing billows and raging winds, 
they had stated services, and their floating craft be- 
came a Bethel. " We came by the good hand of the 
Lord through the deep comfortably," wrote Roger 
Clap, " having preaching or expounding of the word 
of God every day for ten weeks together, by our 
ministers." 

They came a church ; formally organized, and its 
officers installed, at Plymouth, England, on the eve 
of their embarkation ; the only instance of the kind, 
it is said, in the planting of North America. So 
that, strictly, the earliest among the structures in the 
occupancy of our church was not that which has 
been named as such, — that of logs and thatch, rising 
in the wilderness, as it were its own spontaneous 
product — but rather, the good craft " Mary and 
John," that " great ship," as Roger Clap calls it, of 
four hundred tons, wherein our fathers came hither. 
That was the cradle of our church's infancy ; rocked 
by mighty billows, fanned by stormy gales, but over- 
watched by more than a maternal guardianship, until 
it laid its precious charge within the rude lap of 
these Western shores. 

What contrasts to find with all that had been left ! — 
the ceiled houses, the cultured fields, the securities 
and comforts of a settled order, the countless mate- 
rial and social advantages attaching to the highest 
British civilization ; the grand and solemn churches, 



8 



dear to sentiment and heart by many a hallowed 
association — tablet and monument and cenotaph and 
tomb uttering within them silent eulogy of a buried 
Past, the garnered dust of saintly ancestors sleeping 
beneath and around them. 

It was my privilege, three years ago this summer, 
to journey through a portion of their beautiful Dor- 
setshire, and to spend a Sunday in its borough-town, 
Dorchester, whence most of the founders of our 
church and town emigrated, and from which — for 
this and as being the home of Eev. John White, by 
whose effoijts mainly the church was gathered pre- 
paratory to its embarkation — our town was named- 
It was a pilgrimage of duty and of love, which I 
went far out of my way, and gladly, to accomplish. 
That Sunday in old Dorchester was indeed a memo- 
rable one. There was a rare beauty in the day, and 
a charm from nature and the season was spread over 
everything ; but above all and leading all was the 
charm and spell of an historic Past. Going abroad 
in the early morning into the yet silent and empty 
streets, and seeking first of all the churches, I was 
soon standing before one whose signatures of age 
left little need of the confirming word of a passer-by, 
that it was the " St. Peter's " of my especial search. 
I gazed upon it — its hoary walls, its buttressed tower, 
its crumbling mouldings, its dilapidated images, the 
nameless wastings and decays which time had made 



9 



upon its massive substance — with a peculiar and in- 
expressible interest ; not merely for what these in 
themselves suggested, but in the thought of its con- 
nection with my own dear church, three thousand 
miles away ; in the thought that through those door- 
ways and adown those foot-worn steps had passed 
some at least of those brave and s^odly men and 
women who constituted that transplanted vine. The 
doors were open, and I entered. The interior bore 
signs of a like ancientness, though less impressively 
as a whole, by reason of the modernizing freedoms 
which had here and there been taken — in no absence 
of a reverent taste, but simply to secure a reasonable 
comfort to its present occupants. Yet, impressively 
the Past was there ; proclaiming itself in column and 
arch and roof, in statue and monument, in tableted 
wall and recumbent effigy; in pavement-floor inlaid 
with memorial slabs, their inscriptions trod near to 
illcgibleness by over-passing generations, and in many 
a detail more that met continually the eye. Under 
the porch-way, interred in 1648, are the remains of 
that Rev. John White, styled in his day the 
" Patriarch of Dorchester," who — although he never 
came to the New England town bearing, and greatly 
for his sake, the name of that thus dignifying him — 
was, in an important sense, as I have said, the 
founder of the former, and the efficient agent in the 
trans-atl antic gathering of our church. " St. Peter's " 



10 



was not, however, the church of which he was rector, 
but '' Trinity," on the same street, partially rebuilt 
since his day. This also I visited, attending service 
in it — as likewise in St. Peter's — and in whose pleas- 
ant and quiet grave-yard close, with its green turf 
and ivy-covered walls, I passed — not lonesomely, 
though companioned by no visible presence — a mus- 
ing half-hour. Let me say a word more, before pass- 
ing on, of old Dorchester itself — a city in corporate 
capacity, with a population of about ten thousand. 
Its general aspect is pleasing and attractive ; it has an 
air of thrift and comfort and refinement — as if the 
new life of the age had not avoided it in its flow, 
but had borne to it of its best ; while the country 
close around — with its unbroken openness ; its pas- 
toral lovelmess ; its swelling downs of richest verdure, 
flecked by feeding flocks ; its tokens and traces of 
times far prior to the Puritan, even of those of a 
Roman occupancy — commands a peculiar interest. 

What contrasts, I was saying, these comers found 
with all they left! Amidst their local surroundings, 
the fact was more forcibly suggested and gained 
more adequate apprehension. For though, in many 
and important respects, these surroundings are other 
than they were, something can be judged from the 
present even of that distant past ; and whatever else 
is changed, tlie natural pleasantness and charm are 
the same, 'i hey knew beforehand what those con- 



11 



trasts must be. They knew, nt least, that they were 
commg to a wilderness. They knew that they were 
turning their backs, and forever, not only on many 
an outward advantage, but — far more to them — upon 
what sentiment and heart held dear ; — the homes and 
haunts of childhood ; scenes associated with the 
most sacred and tender of life's experiences ; the 
graves of ancestor and cotemporary, above which 
they had kneeled in reverence or bent in tears ; the 
institutions, which, however disposed to deprecate 
some of their practical bearings, they regarded, and 
justly, with patriotic pride. But they had counted the 
cost and were prepared to meet it. Had it not been so, 
had they been disappointed in what they found here, 
had the contrast shocked them by its unanticipated 
greatness, they would have returned — as they could 
have done. But they were not children ; they were 
not fortune-seekers ; they were not of those who 
think the end of existence is to escape as far as pos- 
sible its roughnesses and ills, to eliminate its hard- 
ships and infelicities, and to have a good time of it 
generally ; or, otherwise, to sweat one's life into an 
estate, for the benefit of unthankful heirs. They 
had an end in view which dwarfed ordinary ones into 
insignificance. They had deliberately fronted its 
conditions, and had those conditions been tenfold 
harder than they were, there had been no drawing 
back from it. 



12 

What ivas their end ? What sent them here ? 
Why did they leave their pleasant homes, their cul- 
tured fields, their noble churches, their hallowed 
graves, their famed institutions of civility, learmng, 
philanthropy, i^iety ^ So far as appears from original 
writings which have come down from them, it was 
to secure for themselves and theirs an unmolested 
freedom from the exactions of the established church, 
with regard to certain ceremonies pertaining to its 
worship, against which conscience uttered its protest ; 
it was to secure a greater freedom from ecclesiastical 
exactions and dictations generally ; and, with the more 
intelligent among them, if not in a measure with all 
— as the grand, all-comprehensive purpose — it was to 
found a State wherein God should be the recognized 
and supreme Sovereign, and His W^ord — the Bible — 
its one authoritative Statute-Book ; to found, in other 
words, a Church which should not only dominate 
the State, but he the State — a Theocracy — a new 
Israel, whose God should be the Lord. They be- 
lieved, and it was with them the profoundest of con- 
victions, that they were putting thus into practical 
experiment the loftiest of human aims ; and they 
were willing to subject themselves for the sake of it 
to whatever sacrifices it involved. Doubtless there 
were motives w^orking together with the highest — 
less spiritual, less worthy. Strange had there not 
been. Impossible there should not have been. 



13 



Enough to know the shaping and controlling one- 
enough, at least, for our honoring regard. Their 
end in coming is stated, specifically enough for all but 
the exact historian, in the Preamble of the confederacy 
of the several colonies, held at Cambridge in 1643, 
and which runs thus : — " Whereas, we all came into 
these parts of America with one and the same end 
and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdome of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, and to enjoy the liberties of the 
Gospell in puritie, with peace," &c. It was a rellf/ious 
end they sought ; it was a religious conviction that 
impelled them ; it was a religious fealty that bound 
them ; it was faith in the unseen, the spiritual, the 
immortal — in interests transcending the measure- 
ments of earth and time. 

My remarks may seem to be taking a wider range 
than is called for in a sketch — which is all that was 
proposed — of our particular church. And yet, all 
that has been said of the purpose of the founders of 
New England generally, appertains especially to 
those among them, gathered into a church by the 
" Patriarch of Dorchester," and floated hither in the 
Mary and John. " There came many godly families 
in that ship," wrote Capt. Roger Clap: — "sound 
and learned men " — " men leaving gallant situations " 
— "men of rank and influence" — "very precious 
men and women." 

I proceed with the narrative of the leading historic 



14 



incidents in the external fortunes of our church, from 
that 17th day of June, 1630, when, as already related, 
it came together, roofed only by the sky, for its first 
Sabbath worship after its landing. Its first Meeting- 
House — located near the corner of Cottage and Pleas- 
ant Streets — was not built until the autumn of the 
following year. What accommodations it had for its 
meetings until that time does not appear. The tes- 
timony is — and it accounts sufficiently for the delay 
in providing a House of Worship — that it was a year 
of great destitution wdth them ; that even the last 
loaf failed, and their sole dependence was upon the 
casual and chance supplies of sea-shore and forest. 
And yet, it was with the pressure of want still upon 
them that that first House arose. It was a very rude 
structure, of logs and thatch, surrounded with palli- 
sadoes for defence from the Indians. Very rude 
and lowly ; but — there needs no record to assure 
us — very dear to those who gathered in it ; symbol 
to them, as it was, of that Presence that had attend- 
ed them over the waste of waters, and was with them 
still. There was no beauty in the structure, but the 
" Beauty of Holiness " God saw within it. 

The church soon began to receive accessions by 
arrivals from England. But- in 1635 it sufi"ered im- 
portant reduction — about sixty of its members, main- 
ly induced thereto by the great influx of immigration, 
removing to Windsor, Conn., and taking with them 



15 

one of its pastors, Mr. Warham. This has been 
sometimes spoken of as a removal of the church. I 
know not with what justification, unless the fact that 
the leaving-portion took with them the records be re- 
garded as such. But its records are not the church. 
The branches are not the root. The church remain- 
ed, and renewed itself — and is here. 

In 1646, after fifteen years of occupancy, the first 
Meeting-House gave place to a larger ; built in the 
same locality, but afterwards removed to the hill — 
thence called, as since and still, " Meeting-House 
Hill." This was in 1670 ; so that for just two hun- 
dred years our church has had its worshipping home 
on this hill. The House removed hither — posited a 
little west of this — was succeeded, seven years after, 
by another ; which, though larger and better than its 
predecessor, has its dimensions and finish indicated 
in the fact that its cost was but iJ200. It had, how- 
ever, the unprecedented ornament, terminating its 
pyramidal roof, of a cupola ; in which swung the un- 
wonted luxury of a bell — the latter an importation, 
of course, from '• home," and imparting to imagina- 
tion, as the once familiar sounds first broke the still- 
ness of the Sabbath morning, how much of home 
itself! In 1743, a new House, of far exceeding size 
and cost, arose, near the same spot ; and this — re- 
membered by some of you — gave place, in 1816, to 
the one we now occupy : — this House of our love, 



16 



bearing so well its more than half-century age that 
the time seems very far when need, or — may I not 
add ? — desire, shall call for its successor ; holding a 
place, as it does — with the improvements it has from 
time to time undergone — among the most desirable 
of the church-edifices of our vicmity ; combining a 
Puritanic simplicity with a chastened ornamentation ; 
representing — as rightly it should — the " Meeting- 
House " of the Fathers, rather than the " Churches " 
from which they fled, the Protestantism they were 
faithful to, rather than the Medievalism they repudi- 
ated ; standing apart — none too w^idely — from those 
architectural anachronisms — out of place alike in New 
England and the century — whose pretentiousness, in 
view of the old-world structures of which they are 
the incongruous diminutives, is even more endurable 
than the discordancy of their aspects with the bright 
and cheering Faith which Christianity is to us. 

Of those who have ministered in these successive 
structures I would briefly speak. The earlier of 
them, especially — as reliable records witness — were 
men of more than ordinary gifts and learning, 
measured- by the clerical standard of their day — a 
standard much higher, we have reason to believe, 
than that of later times and of our own ; while the 
term " godly," applied to them, though having pri- 
mary reference to the nature of their function, found 
highest justification in the devoutness that exercised 



17 



it. The line begins with Maverick and Warham. 
They had dared, in a loyalty to conscience, to break 
from the established church, and had formed and min- 
istered to a non-conforming congregation in Plymouth, 
before being ordained over the hither-corning church. 
Warham followed the portion of the church that re- 
moved to Connecticut : Maverick soon ended his then 
lengthened days here. Then came Richard Mather. 
Suspended from the exercise of his ministerial func- 
tions for his Puritanical principles, he sought field for 
their renewal here ; bearing hither a high repute for 
learning and ability. He was at once solicited by 
several churches to settle with them, and decided, by 
advice of Mr. Cotton and other leading ministers of 
the Colony, for this ; continuing its minister thirty- 
three years, until his death. His ministry is described 
as eminently successful ; his influence was great and 
wide ; his fame and praise in all the churches. For 
a time associated with him was Jonathan Burr ; also 
silenced for non-conformity, and bearing with him a 
repute for learning and piety. He died, after a min- 
istry of less than three years, in the thirty-seventh 
year of his age. Testimonies have reached us to 
the remarkable loveliness of his character and the 
pathetic eloquence of his speech ; and the picture 
wliich through these 1 bear of him has always draw n 
me to him, as to no other of my predecessors. In 
164:9, John Wilson, Jr., was ordained as " coadjutor " 



18 



with Mr. Mather ; but after two years withdrew, and 
exercised a long ministry in Medfield. The next in 
the line of ministers was Josiah Flint, a graduate of 
our own Harvard. He was ordained in 1671, and 
had a ministry of nine years, ended by his death. 
His life and labors have scant, but honoring, memo- 
rials ; and his epitaph, in the old burial-ground, 
speaks of him as " the good scholar and earnest 
preacher and devoted pastor." He was succeeded, 
in 1682, by John Danforth, whose ministry, of forty- 
eight years — the testimony is — " was in great fidelity, 
and in the exercise of superior talents and graces." 
Jonathan Bowman followed ; ordained as colleague 
of Mr. Danforth, and continuing his pastoral relations 
for forty years ; when, unpleasant differences arising 
between him and some of his parishioners, an eccle- 
siastical council advised a separation. " He was a 
man," says a cotemporary, " of austere deportment, 
but of infiexible integrity, and was venerated by the 
most eminent of his cotemporaries for his talents and 
piety." In 1 TT4 Moses Everett was ordained, preach- 
ing with great acceptance, until 1793, " when," says 
an obituary notice of him, " the declining state of 
his health compelled him to relinquish an office he 
was too feeble to fulfil and too conscientious to neg- 
lect." He was an active and interested member of 
the church after he ceased to be its minister, and did 
honorable and honored service in several distinguish- 



y 



\ 



19 



ccl civil capacities. Directly following the ministry 
of Mr. Everett was that of Thaddeus Mason Harris, 
continuing forty-three years. Many among you were 
the personal witnesses of his ministry and sharers of 
its blessings. Theij^ surely, need no reminding from 
me of what he was. But there are others of you — 
too young, or too late in joining us, to have known 
him — for whose sakes I am glad to speak of him, 
though it must be so inadequately : — of his purity 
and refinement of mind ; his scholarly acquisitions, 
gained by a life of reading and research ; his humble 
conscientiousness ; his gentle and guileless and child- 
like spirit ; his quick and flowing sympathies, giving 
tear for tear ; his exquisite sensibilities, not seldom 
overmastering him — responsive to each passing ap- 
peal, as to straying breezes an ^olian harp — shrink- 
ing from the slightest look of unkindliuess, and 
brightening in the tokens of an appreciative friendli- 
ness, as blossoms in the sun. May Heaven have 
given thee, my father, as I doubt not it has, a min- 
istry more congenial than earth's ! I was ordained, 
as colleague with Dr. Harris, in 1835. But his offi- 
cial connection with the parish was soon, at his re- 
quest — hastened by failing health and removal from 
the town — entirely severed ; leaving unsevered, to the 
last, the tie of a mutual and affectionate regard. 

For two centuries, lacking a score, the First Parish 
was the sole one of the town, and the town territo- 



20 



rially far larger than we have known it — no less 
than five towns being now embraced in its original 
limits. Most of the parishes that have grown np 
around it were formed by outflowings from its fulness, 
and demand, therefore, a passing notice in this his- 
toric sketch. The Second Church was organized in 
1808. Its original members were almost wholly, I 
believe, from this ; and went from it simply because 
the old home had no room for them — in a spirit of 
fellowship and good-will. And although thht spirit — 
at least of fellowship — did not continue, good-will, 
I trust, did and does. I am sure I represent justly 
the older church in saying, that it cherishes none 
but the kindest feelings — shame to it if it did not ! — 
towards the younger, and bids it, in the fellowship of a 
common Gospel, " Gocl-speed." In 1813, the Third 
Congregational Society was organized. Though di- 
rectly an offset from the Second Church — owing to 
dissatisfaction connected with its administration — 
yet, composed, as it was, from among those who had 
so recently gone from the First, it was more strictly 
an offset from that. In 1819, the Hawes Place 
Church, located on territory afterwards taken into 
Boston, was organized ; having for its leading mem- 
bers those who had been connected with the First 
Church. In 1848, the church at Harrison Square, 
bearing the corporate name of the " Third Unitarian 
Society," was gathered, in some part from this ; and 



21 



lastly, in 1859, the " Chnrcli of the Unity," at Ne- 
ponsct — towards which the First Church expressed 
its maternal regard by the gift of a communion ser- 
vice, and by removing its debt. All these are in a 
sense our church's offspring. And yet the parent 
suffers no decline ; and the new generations, as they 
come forward to salute her, almost forget how old 
she is, in the flush of youth she bears, and well nigh 
lose their reverence in their love. An incident in 
the early history of our church claims mention in 
this connection. In 1695, during the ministry of 
Mr. Danforth, a church was organized, under the 
auspices, and composed in part of members, of this 
church, in view to a settlement in South Carolina. 
A southern writer, sketching the after-history of the 
movement, says: — "The Macedonian cry of the pious 
in Carolina was heard in New England, and the re- 
ligious sentiment of the Dorchester settlers was 
awakened. They had planted the first church in 
Connecticut, and now they were ready to gather 
another to send to the far distant South." It was 
purely a missionary enterprise — the earliest one from 
New England — and as such, apart from its connec- 
tion with the history of our church, deserves notice. 
It was an enterprise singularly correspondent, in its 
inception and circumstances and inspiring spirit, to 
that of which, sixty-five years before, Plymouth, 
England, was the scene, and the planting of Dor- 



22 

Chester, New England, the result. The church — 
like that — was formally organized on the eve of its 
departure, and its pastor ordained ; Mr. Danforth 
preaching the sermon, amidst many touching and 
pious demonstrations on the part of those it left. 
The passage, so small a matter now, was only less 
formidable then than that from continent to conti- 
nent. And it took them to a literal wilderness. 
" Landing on the shores of Carolina, they threaded 
their way to the Ashley river, and in the midst of an 
unbroken forest fixed their habitation — calling their 
new home, Dorchester ; building a Meeting-House, 
and growing into a prosperous community." Fifty- 
two years afterward, by reason of the increase of 
settlers and in part the unhcalthiness of the locality, 
their descendants — over eight hundred in number — 
removed to Midway, Georgia, where the church still 
exists — retaining not only its original congregational 
order, but also, according to reliable testimony, the 
features, morally — itself and the community around 
— which betoken a Puritan lineage. 

Our church has fallen — so some would express 
it — from the doctrinal basis of its founders. We 
would choose to say, rather, has risen. But it is of 
slightest moment by what term is designated a change 
whereto conviction led, and wherein conviction has 
more and more confirmed. To have fallen — if that 
must be the term — from the dogmas of the fathers 



23 



is not necessarily to have fallen from the truth as it 
is in Jesus. They were fallible — as also are we. 
But we repair to the same Fountain ; we listen to 
the same Oracle. The Bible is our Statute-Book, 
too ; though with freer and bolder mind we demand 
its sense, regarding less the letter than the spirit. 
Nor, in departing from the doctrinal position of our 
fathers, do we acknowledge, or feel, by that fact 
alone, that we have departed from them. Not, sure- 
ly, so long as we are seekers after truth, and allegiant 
to what we see as such. " I am verily persuaded," 
said Robinson, " that the Lord has more truth yet to 
break forth from his holy word." To us it has 
broken ; and that were the departure from the fathers 
to be deplored which should refuse to follow it. And 
we are unjust to them, if we suppose the noble Ley- 
den pastor to be alone in the broadness which thus 
uttered itself. The church-covenants they framed 
declare plainly the contrary. They were not creeds, 
in any limiting sense. They committed the assenters 
to them simply to what the Bible did, or might, teach 
them. " So far as we do already know or shall fur- 
ther understand, out of God's holy word," are the 
terms in which our own church-members promised 
fidelity, imder its covenant of 1636. The freedom- 
giving qualification Avas, T believe, almost universal. — 
And, after all, we are with them — those men of the 
Past — by agreements in belief, rather than from them 



24 



by difFcrcnces. Apart from the metaphysics of the- 
ology, arc the truths of rehgioii. In these we are 
at one with them. And these it was, — the great, vital, 
uncontroverted truths of Christ's Christianity, which 
made them the heroes of Faith they were ; followers, 
for Righteousness and Humanity's sake, of a self- 
denying Lord. It was, probably, during the early 
part of the ministry of my immediate predecessor, 
that the line began to be drawn, with a recognized 
distinctness, between the Congregational churches of 
the vicinity ; separating those which had till then 
been in fellowship, and placing this among the num- 
ber in avowed dissent from the creed of the Puritans. 
It is a fact of much interest, whatever significance 
may be given it, that the earliest-founded churches of 
New England were among the earliest in such dis- 
sent. To speak with exactness, — thirty-one of the 
churches founded within the first half-century from 
the arrival of the " Mayflower," were, and are, 
among those styled " Liberal," as distinguished from 
the so-called " Orthodox." 

I have thus given, as best I could, a sketch of our 
church's history. I have wished at some time to do 
it — as a duty which I owed the church, and the Pro- 
vidence that has allied for a time my history with its 
own ; and it seemed fitting and well that I should do 
it now. For although the two hundred and fortieth 



25 

anniversary of an event is not among those which 
especially demand or suggest historic retrospect, the 
tenth year onward from this — which will bring such 
— I cannot look to S'ce, 

And now, let me ask you to pondor with me, be- 
fore we part, that sentiment of Hebrew piety — sen- 
timent of the devout heart, in all ages, under all 
religions, looking back on a Providentially-guided 
ancestry; brought to us now in new relations, in- 
vested with a new interest, as inscribed on the seal 
of that civic authority under which our church and 
our homes are henceforth to be :• — " God be with us 
as he was with our fathers." Let it not be with us 
a sentiment only, barren and dead, but a living and 
a life-imparting force, a prayer that God can answer 
with holiest blessing. And let us know and feel that 
He can so answer it only as we put heart and life 
into it ; that He will be with us as He Avas with our 
fathers — Leader, Deliverer, Guardian, Friend — only 
as we make their spirit ours, — the spirit of a self- 
consecrating fidelity ; only as we pursue worthy ends, 
cherish unselfish dispositions, live for immortal prin- 
ciples, " seek first the Kingdom of God and His 
righteousness." Such, emphatically, was their seek- 
ing. God's Kingdom was first, and all else second- 
ary. And so was God with them, in a fulfilment — 
how better than literal ! — of His promise. " All 
needed things," as inventoried by the worldly-minded, 



26 



tliey had not ; but they had mward satisfactions, en- 
joyments, benedictions, hopes — " meat >yhich the 
•world knows not of." Yes ; and successes, triumphs, 
though they saw them but in part; successes, tri- 
umphs, which, as the world has seen them — or, may 
be, themselves have, from ascended heights — there 
was no prophet among them bold enough to predict. 
Our fathers trusted in God, and it was a practical 
trust ; it went forth in deeds. God was a reality to 
them — none gi*eater. He was a presence — none so 
near : present to them in conscience, present to them 
in the Bible. What through these He told them, 
unquestioningly, unfalteringly, they did. They may 
have had in some respects an unenlightened con- 
science : they may have regarded too reverently the 
mere letter of the Bible : they may have been — they 
were — nan'ow, intolerant, stern. But we are to be 
careful, if we would do them no injustice, how we 
let these things affect our moral estimate of them. 
They are to be judged by their own times, and their 
own circumstances. They were true to their light. 
They were faithful to their convictions. Fidelity — 
allegiance of heart and life to the supreme law and 
the Sovereign Law-giver, — this was their grand pe- 
culiarity. So ivas God with them. So will He be — 
so must He be, by the eternal necessity of His 
nature — with all — every individual, every church, 
every people — that in like manner are with Him. 



27. 

They shall prosper : they shall triumph. His cause, 
through them, shall : and that is prosperity, that is 
triumph — the highest, the noblest. He may lead 
them through sea and wilderness — through hardship, 
privation, strait. What matter I They near a Pro- 
mised Land. It is sure for their descendants, if not 
for them. Nay, for them it is : — theirs, by more than 
faith and trust and hope ; by the attesting presence 
and approval and acceptance of a covenant God. 



I 



i 



LIBRARY OF CONGPP<:c 

ini 




